How long can an SMS message be?

We differentiate between the length of a single message and the length of a single SMS. A standard SMS can contain up to 160 characters, depending on the alphabet used in your SMS. But you can send one complete message with a total of up to 1377 characters via our platform, this will need 9 SMS messages to send.

For a concatenated SMS the costs of each extra SMS will be charged. The table below illustrates the amount of SMS needed to send a message that corresponds to each amount of characters.

Number of SMS

Maximum GSM characters

Maximum Unicode characters

1

160

70

2

306

134

3

459

201

4

612

268

5

765

335

6

918

402

7

1071

469

8

1224

536

9

1377

603

Not all countries support concatenated SMS and might handle multi-part SMS in different ways. You can check if the country you want to send messages to does or doesn't support concatenated SMS in our country info & restrictions.

If you’re sending a message from the Dashboard, there is a counter that indicates the amount of SMS and characters you’ve used in the bottom right-hand corner of the text box where you enter the message.